Alex Narvais
English 1302
Professor Hawley
2/10/13
Love and Time Shakespeare’s uses three of his poems to describe love and the passage of time. Sonnets twelve, sixty-four, and seventy-three all share this meaning by Shakespeare. Love comes in to play by explaining to “love well” cause time is not endless. Each poem has its own different plot on time and love. Sonnet sixty-four deals with the speaker telling his loved one that time will soon take them from each other. In Sonnet twelve the speaker is preaching that the only way to defeat time is to procreate. Finally, in Sonnet seventy-three an old man is reflecting on his past life and telling it to a younger man, hoping the young man will understand how quick life goes. The poems all start off with the speakers explaining what they have seen or have been through over their lives. The beginnings to the poems are very emotional and serious. They all use interesting word choice to describe how quick time has gone by. Sonnet twelve begins “When I do count the clock that tells the time, / And see the brave day suck in hideous night (Shakespeare, 1-2).” The word clock was used to explain how the speaker has watched time pass and night fall as his life has gone by so quickly. Sonnet seventy-three begins “ That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang (Shakespeare, 1-2).” The words behold and hand describe that the speaker is describing his life like the season autumn. The speaker also explains that the yellow leaves hanging are like the stages of his life slowly going by. Each leaf falling, is like a year of the his life going by and sooner or later there will be no leaves meaning his life has come to an end. Sonnet sixty-four begins “ When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age (Shakespeare, 1-2).” The words seen, fell, and hand explain that time has become the enemy and he has seen it destroy and take away many great things. The poems continue but later towards the middle change towards the speaker wanting the listener to understand that he or she will have their lives come to an end one day. The speaker is basically saying to cherish every moment and don’t waste your time, use it wisely. Sonnet twelve says “Then of thy beauty do I question make, / That though among the waste of time must go, / Since Sweets and beauties do themselves forsake / And dies as fast as they see others grow (Shakespeare, 9-12),” telling the person that he questions his beauty because he too will age and die with time, because everything beautiful dies as quickly as new beauty emerges. The speaker wants him to not waste a moment in his life. In Sonnet seventy-three the speaker is describing himself as a fire and how it glows in the beginning but can’t be reborn from its ashes, and the dying of the fire means the end. Time has become the enemy and the passing of time is the creator and destroyer of life. Sonnet seventy-three “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire/ That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, / As the death bed whereon it must expire / Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by (Shakespeare, line 9-12)” uses a great metaphor to describe the fire as time and letting the listener know that glowing of the fire is the best part and never waste a minute from looking at it because before you know, there is nothing but ashes. In Sonnet sixty-four says “When I have seen such interchange of state / Or state itself confounded to decay; / Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,